Ukraine: Tsar power pits Vladimir Putin's empire against the West

Never has one man been so misunderstood, so underestimated. Researchers have crawled over the life and learning of Vladimir Putin, hoping to understand a man whose designs on Ukraine's Crimea peninsula have the world in a spin.

There was George W. Bush's famous ''I looked the man in the eye'' observation, in June 2001, in which the former US president judged the Russian leader to be very straightforward and trustworthy - ''We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.''

It remains to be seen whether Putin wants to crush Ukraine, or merely to cripple it as a regional player. Photo: AP

In November 2004, then German chancellor Gerhard Schroder shared his thoughts on Putin - a ''flawless democrat,'' he said. And when Barack Obama took over the White House in January 2009, he charged then secretary of state Hillary Clinton with the task of ''resetting'' the US relationship with Moscow - that's the same Clinton this week accused of reckless endangerment for likening Putin to Adolf Hitler.

Speaking in California, Clinton observed, like many others, that Putin's objective was to ''re-Sovietise Russia's periphery.'' Clinton, the likely Democrat nominee for the presidency in 2016, was partly right. Putin does look to the past, but to an era of Russian greatness that pre-dated the Soviet Union by about 200 years - the ruthless reign of the Peter the Great.

A Der Spiegel profile in 2012 tells of Putin having switched from working for the KGB to a post in municipal government in St Petersburg on the eve of the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 - which he later lamented as ''the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.''

On moving into his new office Putin unceremoniously junked the standard issue portrait of Lenin, calling instead for a portrait of Peter the Great - and a janitor duly arrived with two images of the Tsar.

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At 39, Putin might have opted for the image of Peter as a young man, described as ''amiable and idealistic, a moderniser who wanted to open the ''window to Europe''. Nope - Putin picked the portrait of Peter near the end of his 53 years, gnarled and bruised by palace intrigues and wars of conquest and suppression.

Ivan Krastev, of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, writes in Foreign Affairs: ''He surely dreams of the pre-1914 days, when Russia was autocratic but accepted, revolutions were not tolerated, and Russia could be part of Europe while preserving its distinctive culture and traditions.''

Putin reacts to a massive rally of his supporters at Manezh Square in Moscow. Photo: AP

Putin wears a deeply held sense of Russian grievance on his sleeve and his uncompromising toughness is bent towards restoring Russia to the top of the pile - either in the sense of Peter's great modernising or with Moscow going toe-to-toe with Washington during the Cold War. So he happily intervened in Syria last year, to head off an American attack; and the opening ceremony to last month's Winter Olympics at Sochi was Putin's telegram to the world - Russia is back; get used to it.

As Putin reclaimed the presidency in 2012, the Moscow commentator Vladimir Pozner told a visiting reporter: ''For the average Russian, who is a very proud person with a sense of history and a belief that his is a great country, Putin has given him back his sense of pride - you cannot ignore us any more, the way you did when [former president Boris] Yeltsin was in power and Russia was on its knees.''

This was the context in which Putin told a campaign rally: ''We're a victorious people. It's in our genes, in our genetic code, passed down from generation to generation. The battle for Russia continues! We will be victorious! We won't let anyone meddle in our domestic affairs … don't cheat on your motherland!''

Putin already had taken that battle to Georgia, in 2008, when he marched troops over his southern border, on the same flimsy pretext as he has them in Ukraine - to protect the local Russian population. Those troops still occupy the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

For the average Russian, who is a very proud person with a sense of history and a belief that his is a great country, Putin has given him back his sense of pride

As now, there was uproar in the West - there were diplomatic sanctions and threats of economic sanctions, but the world moved on and Putin got away with it. Just as with Bush on Georgia, Obama faces an angry chorus of demands for retaliation on behalf of the Ukraine - everything, from military exercises on Russia's doorstep to Iran-style sanctions to lock Moscow out of the international financial system.

But London and Europe are having none of that - too much of Russia's money churns through the City of London and too many homes and factories in continental Europe are heated and fired by Russian gas.

Articulating the Putin agenda as an attempt to reconstruct the former empire, but ''on a Russian model, rather than Soviet,'' former US national security adviser Stephen Hadley explained this week: ''He has been cunning and shrewd. His preferred tools of intimidation and blackmail succeeded in keeping Armenia and Belarus in Moscow's orbit.

''Where those tools were inadequate, he turned to force, moving incrementally - first in Georgia, now in Ukraine - so as not to destroy economic and diplomatic relations with Europe and the US.''

In both these incursions, Putin does not require total submission by the locals, so much as he wants to make the European Union and NATO think twice about signing up the victims of his aggression as members - thereby leaving them susceptible to whatever pressure or blandishments he might apply to yank them back into his orbit.

Since 2010, Putin has been touting the Eurasian Union, a trade block he envisages as a counter to the power of China, Europe and the US. So far, this free-trade customs union comprised just Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus.

Both Armenia and Kyrgyzstan are succumbing to Putin's browbeating and are expected to sign up for membership in the coming year - Armenia was rewarded with a 30 per cent cut in its gas price when it dropped its bid for closer ties with the EU last year.

But Azerbaijan, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan reportedly have cold feet - and instead are casting glances to Europe.

After being clobbered by Putin in 2008, Georgia is a reluctant starter and as for the Ukraine, the current crisis is all about which way Ukraine should look - East or West?

As in the EU, Putin envisages uniform economic and legal systems forming a bridge between Europe and Asia - with himself as pointsman. And here we come to the vital role of the Ukraine in Moscow's calculations - if Putin cannot keep a foot on Ukraine, then how can any of the rest of the former Soviet republics be cajoled or bludgeoned into sticking with the Russians?

It was Soviet policy to encourage Russians to migrate to these former republics. By the time of the final collapse of the USSR in 1991, more than 25 million Russians were out on the fringes, ranging from 37.8 per cent of the total population of Kazakhstan to just 1.6 per cent in Armenia. According to a 2002 study by the Washington Migration Policy Institute, the vast majority of them had remained as citizens of the new nation states.

Just as Russians who comprise about 60 per cent of the population of Crimea are Putin's pawn in the Ukraine, tiny Moldova has its own tinier pockets of Russians, areas known as Transnistria and Gagauzia, which analysts expect can be manipulated to do Putin's bidding. In a recent plebiscite, Gagauzia voted 98.5 per cent in favour of joining Putin's trading bloc despite a decision by the Moldovan government to seek EU membership.

It remains to be seen whether Putin wants to crush Ukraine, or merely to cripple it as a regional player, which, he would hope, would leave it at his mercy economically, rather than in the embrace of the European Union.

Loud opinion page pieces in the US are comparing Putin's encroachment in Ukraine with the American-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Eugene Robinson wrote in The Washington Post: ''We're supposed to be shocked - shocked! - that a great military power would cook up a pretext to invade a smaller, weaker nation? I'm sorry, but has anyone forgotten the unfortunate events in Iraq a few years ago?''

None of the players in today's Crimea were in office during the Cold War, the decades following World War II in which many chaffed for a global dynamic freed of the constraints of a doctrine referred to as MAD (mutually assured destruction), when hair-trigger settings for Washington and Moscow's huge nuclear arsenals created an imperative to avoid and defuse crises such as that roiling the Ukraine.

There were wars - Korea and Vietnam - but generally caution prevailed over confrontation. And when there were fisticuffs, it was usually in the context of tightly controlled proxy skirmishes. In this context, it's worth pondering how much of the conflict since the turn of the century might have been averted if the MAD doctrine were still in place - the invasions of Iran and Afghanistan; Syria, Egypt, Libya and even the September 11 attacks on the US.

So, when one of the giants of the Cold War strode to the centre of the Crimea debate on Thursday, his critique sounded more MAD than mad.

Writing on the opinion page of The Washington Post, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger argued that Ukraine should not be seen as either of the East or the West - ''it should function as a bridge between them.''

Russia had to understand that military force would not work; while the West needed to appreciate that to Russia the Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. Europe needed to see that its ''bureaucratic dilatoriness'' and subordination of strategy to domestic politics in its negotiations with Kiev had contributed to the crisis.

It remains to be seen how this plays out. There's talk of finding an ''off-ramp'' for Putin, if indeed he wants one. So far, he's staring down the West, refusing to blink.

But it is conceivable that if he is allowed to maintain his economic and security influence over the Ukraine generally and the Crimea in particular, he'll happily withdraw the troops - save for the thousands who are garrisoned at his navy bases on Crimea's Black Sea coast.

And strategically, it would be counter-productive for Putin to have the Crimea hived off from Ukraine, because millions of Russians in Crimea would no longer get to vote in Ukrainian elections, producing outcomes that most likely would tip the Ukraine more towards Europe and the West.

In which case, the only fly in the ointment is Ukraine itself - has it been so discombobulated by its role as the meat in an East-West sandwich that it can't calm its internal differences and settle down? How long would it take for even the most marginal of local grievances to be massaged to the point of new appeals to Moscow or NATO for intervention?

And what if such actions found imitators in those postage stamps that did not exist as independent nations during the Cold War - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan; and even the bigger of the former Soviet republics - Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan?

Kissinger was kind to today's players. He did not single out Clinton or former Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain for their Hitler comparisons.

But he issued this rebuke: ''For the West, the demonisation of Vladimir Putin is not a policy - it's an alibi for the absence of one.'' And he warned all the sabre rattlers - and that's about two-thirds of Washington - that ''the test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins.''